JUST A FEW PLAYERS CAN DECIDE THEMSELVES

Leo commands above all

BNC 09 October 2018 11:32 h.

Leo has made some controversial decisions

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There are people in life, like Leo, who decide over their trainers and act according to sensations that are inexplicable because they are only in the minds of the greatest. The coaching staff ached and even came to disturb his absence that morning in late April 2012 because he undressed them before the rest, but the club was so extremely subject to his figure that they could not attribute anything to him. Neither Pep nor Tito could then months later, nor Luis Enrique after the Argentinian did not appear on the day of Kings of 2015 to train with his teammates. Leo has an intriguing capricious point in any out of series. In one of the first training of the Vilanova era there was a scuffle between Leo and Marc Bartra. The center had entered hard in a defensive action with the Argentine to which Messi reacted with another entry and with a shot looking for the body of Bartra.

Tito wanted to see it as an anecdote without bad faith but Messi had pissed off. He retired from training without stretching and exaggerated an injury so as not to travel with the team to the match against Hamburg. A reaction that meant a loss of money for the club (400,000 euros) and about which nobody reproached him absolutely nothing. It's Messi. And what sometimes takes away from you, sometimes gives it to you and, even if an excessively Machiavellian theory is applied, you already know that it is an injustice to treat all players equally.

In fact, that somewhat childish reaction had also occurred a few months before (with Pep as a coach), in this case for the good of the team. Leo had not entered the squad for a match against Osasuna at Camp Nou due to stomach problems and by seven o'clock in the afternoon, the players were coming to the locker room. The last to arrive in surprise Pep and the rest of the technicians was Messi. Pep asked the staff: "I've seen badly or was it, Leo?" "You have not seen badly, he's sitting," Estiarte answered. "But I was not with a tummy ache?" Pep asked what the former water polo player replied: "Well, it does not seem like it anymore”.

Pep did not include him in the starting eleven and when the team went out to do the usual warm-ups he went straight to him to ask about his improvement. Messi assured him that he was ready to play but he was not going to start because Pep had decided his lineup. In the second part, Leo came out to warm up generating two reactions: the joy in the Camp Nou and the frustration in Mendilibar, Osasuna coach. The current coach of Eibar did not expect Leo and even put a furious face when he saw him go to the field in what he considered a deplorable strategy by Guardiola.

Leo left. And in 25 minutes he was in charge of eliminating Osasuna with two goals. No stomach pain, no vomiting, nothing like it. Leo had felt good after the nap and mate made miraculous medicine in a soccer player who, again, proved to be governed by different laws. In this case, of nature. Mendilibar commented on the brilliant recovery of the Argentine star: "We had been told that Messi did not play, dizzy to all God. All very strange, but what is he going to do? I asked Messi during the warm-up if he was suffering from the flu and he has declined”, the coach concluded.